Day 2 … Great Conference!

The first session was an overview of the results of surveys by Staffing Industry Analysts that gave a good overview of how we are doing as an industry, some insight about what our clients are thinking, together with some projections on industry size etc. Good stuff!

The highlight for me was a keynote from Daniel Burrus, a Technology Futurist from Burrus Research. What an interesting presentation as he proceeded to inform the audience how we could forecast the future if we apply some fairly well developed principles. His methodology involves looking at cycles, and at trends …although not all trends can be used in this way. “Soft” trends cannot be used for forecasting … the great example was that the five years following the death of Elvis saw a huge increase in Elvis impersonators. The trend might have suggested that if such growth continued for enough years then 95% of the US population would be Elvis impersonators … gotta love those statistics.

“Hard” trends are however great indicators of where business can come from! One example was the demographic impact of 78 million boomers retiring in the next 10 to 15 years… this will happen! Do you think this will affect the healthcare systems, high risk investment portfolios, hiring plans etc?

Fascinating stuff! Also had some great conversation with peers, competitiors, analysts, suppliers … saw some system demos and generally soaked up information!